The 2025 Spending Review signals a renewed government commitment to reforming children’s social care. The £1.1 billion allocated to it includes £555 million through a new Transformation Fund “to help more children stay with their families.”
The rhetoric of “prevention” and “family help” is welcome. It suggests a shift away from crisis management towards addressing the underlying conditions that bring families into contact with statutory services. Research from Dr Calum Webb, Centre Associate from the University of Sheffield, has consistently argued for such an approach by showing the consequences of disinvestment in prevention. Cuts to early help and family support services are strongly linked to rising rates of child protection intervention. This is not merely a fiscal inefficiency; it reflects avoidable harm to families who might otherwise have been supported to stay together.
The Transformation Fund offers an opportunity to rebalance the system—but only if backed by sustained investment, long-term strategy, and structural reform. One-off injections of funding risk being absorbed by overstretched services unless they are supported by careful, locally grounded implementation.
Family Hubs and Digital Inclusion
The continued investment in family hubs offers a potentially powerful mechanism to achieve this. With the aim of reducing the need for statutory child protection involvement, these hubs are intended to provide early help through coordinated, non-stigmatising support across health, education, and social care. Their success, however, will depend on accessibility and integration.
The current research of another of our Associates, Dr Harriet Churchill, on digitally enabled family hubs is especially timely. Her work explores how digital innovation can improve inclusivity—particularly for families in remote or underserved communities. As services increasingly move to hybrid models, ensuring family hubs are designed for inclusion, not just efficiency, is vital for realising their potential.
Reframing Risk and Rethinking the System
While the Spending Review’s emphasis on prevention is encouraging, the £1.1 billion committed still falls well short of the £2.6 billion argued by the 2022 “The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care” as necessary for comprehensive, whole-system reform. Without that level of ambition, there is a real risk that well-intentioned changes will struggle to deliver lasting impact.
What’s needed is not just new spending—but a new way of thinking about children’s social care. This includes adopting a social model of child protection, as advocated by Professor Kate Morris and others—one that focuses not only on families, but on the systems, services and structures that shape their lives. Rather than viewing families primarily as sites of risk, this model recognises how the state and wider society can provide support, not surveillance.
A key test of this shift lies in how we understand and respond to neglect, still one of the most commonly cited reasons for care entry. Too often, the term is used to describe the visible impacts of deep-rooted socio-economic hardship, rather than deliberate parental omission or harm. Our new NIHR-funded project, Informing policy and practice to prevent care entry through a better understanding of ‘neglect’, delivered in partnership with the University of Liverpool, seeks to challenge and clarify how “neglect” is applied in practice. The project will explore how risks arising from poverty, poor housing or parental ill-health can be distinguished from those that genuinely relate to parental neglect—and how earlier, more appropriate support can prevent unnecessary entry into care.
If the government’s investment in prevention is to deliver meaningful change, this work must be matched by structural reform, careful implementation, and a commitment to rethinking how we define and respond to risk.
A Central Role for Kinship Care
One clear example of where this kind of system thinking can be applied is in kinship care—where children are raised by extended family or close friends when their parents are unable to care for them. Kinship care can offer stability, continuity, and a stronger sense of identity for children, while reducing pressure on the formal care system. But to fulfil this potential, kinship carers must be properly supported with access to consistent financial, practical, and emotional help – which is not currently the case.
While there was a pledge to provide £560m for children’s homes and foster care placements, kinship care was not mentioned directly in the Spending Review. Nonetheless, its emphasis on family support and early intervention aligns closely with the aims and principles of kinship arrangements. Now is the time to move kinship care from the margins of policy to the centre—by confirming the promised trial of a kinship allowance and establishing clear, accessible support pathways. As a form of early intervention already embedded in many children’s lives, kinship care deserves far greater recognition and resourcing in future spending and reform plans.
Beyond the Billions
If we are serious about reforming children’s social care then, we must do more than increase funding. We must rethink how we understand families, risk, and support—embedding prevention not just in budgets, but in the values, relationships and designs of the system itself.
This is not just about spending differently. It is about thinking differently—about care, about support, and about the futures we build with families.
Read our response to the Spending Review in relation to Adult Social Care here.
About the author
Nathan Hughes is Professor of Adolescent Health and Justice, co-director of CIRCLE – the Centre for International Research on Care, Labour and Equalities – at the University of Sheffield.
He is Deputy Director of the Centre for Care, and lead for the Children and Families theme. This reflects his broad research interests in effective support to vulnerable young people, including those affected by health and developmental difficulties and those within the child protection system.
